Val McDermid - The Grave Tattoo

Jane Gresham stared at what she had written then with an impatient stroke of her pen crossed it through so firmly the paper tore and split in the wake of the nib. Bloody Jake , she thought angrily. She was a grownup, not some lovestruck adolescent. Sub-poetic maundering was something she should have left behind years ago. She’d had insight enough to know she was never going to be a poet by the time she’d finished her first degree. Studying other people’s poetry was what she was good at; interpreting their work, exploring thematic links in their verse and opening up their complexity to those who were, she hoped, an assorted number of steps behind her in the process. ‘Bloody, bloody Jake,’ she said out loud, crumpling the paper savagely and tossing it in the bin. He wasn’t worth the expense of her intellectual energy. Nor the familiar claw of pain that grabbed at her chest at the thought of him.

Eager to shunt aside thoughts of Jake, Jane turned to the stack of CDs beside the desk in the poky room that the council classified as a bedroom but which she called, with knowing pretentiousness, her study. She scanned the titles, deliberately starting at the bottom, looking for something that held no resonance of her…what was he? Her ex? Her erstwhile lover? Her lover-in-abeyance? Who knew? She certainly didn’t. And she doubted very much whether he gave her a second thought from one week to the next. Muttering at herself under her breath, she pulled out Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads and slotted it into the CD drive of her computer. The dark growl of his voice matched her mood so perfectly, it became a paradoxical antidote. In spite of herself, Jane found she was almost smiling.

She picked up the book she had been attempting to study before Jake Hartnell had intruded on her thoughts. But it took her only a few minutes to realise how far her focus had drifted. Irritated with herself again, she slammed it shut. Wordsworth’s letters of 1807 would have to wait.

Before she could decide what to attack next, the alarm on her mobile phone beeped. Jane frowned, checking the time on her phone against the watch on her wrist. ‘Hell and damnation,’ she said. How could it be half past eleven already? Where had the morning gone?

‘Bloody Jake,’ she said again, jumping to her feet and switching off her computer. All that time wasted mooning over him when there were better things to be passionate about. She grabbed her bag and went through to the other room. Officially this was the living room, but Jane used it as a bedsit, preferring to have a completely separate space to work in. It made the rest of her life even more cramped by comparison, but that felt like a small price to pay for the luxury of having somewhere she could lay out her books and papers without having to shift them every time she wanted to eat or sleep.

The small room could barely accommodate even her Spartan existence. Her sofa bed, although folded away now, dominated the space. A table sat against the opposite wall, three wooden chairs tucked under it. A small TV set was mounted on a bracket high on the wall, and a bean bag slouched in the furthest corner. But the room was fresh, its soft green paintwork clean and light. On the wall opposite the sofa hung a series of digital colour photographs of the Lake District, blown up to A3 size and laminated. At the heart of the landscape, Gresham’s Farm, where her family had eked out a meagre living as far back as anyone could trace. No matter what was outside her windows, Jane could wake up in the morning to the world she’d grown up in, the world she still missed every city day.

She stripped off her sweatpants and fleece top, swapping them for tight-fitting black jeans and a black v-neck stretch top that accentuated generous breasts. It wasn’t her first choice of outfit, but experience had taught her that making the most of her assets meant better tips from customers. Luckily her olive skin meant she didn’t look terminal in black, and her co-worker Harry had assured her she didn’t look as lumpy as she felt in the tight top. A glance outside the window at the weather and she grabbed her rainproof jacket from its hook, shrugging into it as she hurried towards the front door. She didn’t care that it lacked any pretence of chic; in this downpour, she cared more about arriving at work dry and warm.

Jane took her invariable last look at the Lakeland vista before walking into a completely different universe. She doubted whether anyone in Fellhead could conjure up her present environment even in their worst imaginings. When she’d told her mother she’d been granted a council flat on the Marshpool Farm Estate, Judy Gresham’s face had lit up. ‘That’s nice, love,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t know you got farms in London.’

Jane shook her head in amused exasperation. ‘There hasn’t been a farm there in donkey’s years, Mum. It’s a sixties council estate. Concrete as far as the eye can see.’

Her mother’s face fell. ‘Oh. Well, at least you’ve got a roof over your head.’

They’d left it at that. Jane knew her mother well enough to know that she wouldn’t want the truth–that Jane had so few qualifying points that the only accommodation the council was going to offer her was exactly the sort of place she’d ended up with. A hard-to-let box on a run-down East End estate where almost nobody had any form of legitimate employment, where kids ran wild day and night, and where there were more used condoms and hypodermic needles than blades of grass. No, Judy Gresham definitely wouldn’t like to think of her daughter living somewhere like that. Apart from anything else, it would seriously impair her ability to boast about how well their Jane was doing.

She’d told her brother Matthew, however. Anything to blunt the edge of the resentment he carried because she was the one who had got away while he’d been left, in his words, to rot in the back of beyond because somebody had to stay for the sake of their parents. It didn’t matter that, as the elder, he’d been the first to fly the nest for university and that he’d chosen to come back to the job he’d always wanted. Matthew, Jane thought, had been born aggrieved.

The irony, of course, was that Jane would have swapped London for Fellhead in the blink of an eye if it had held the faintest possibility of doing the work she loved. But there were no jobs for academics in the Lakes, not even for a Wordsworth specialist like her. Not unless she wanted to swap intellectual rigour and research for lecturing to schoolkids about the Lakeland poets. Nothing would kill her passion for the words faster than that, she knew. So instead, she was stuck in the worst kind of urban hell. Jane tucked her head into her chest as she walked along the galleried balcony to the stairs. By what she could only believe to be the evil whim of the architect, her block had been constructed so that the prevailing wind was funnelled down the walkways, rendering even a gentle summer breeze blustery and uncomfortable. On a showery autumn day, it drove the rain into every nook and cranny of the building as well as the clothes of any inhabitants who bothered to emerge from their flats.

Jane turned into the stairwell and gained a brief respite. No point in even trying the lift. Ignoring the badly spelled graffiti, the unsavoury collections of rubbish blown into the corners and the stink of decay and piss, she trotted downwards. At the first turn of the stairs, her stomach flipped over. It was a sight she’d seen so often she knew she should have been inured to it, but every time she saw the tiny frame perched precariously in the lotus position on the narrow concrete banister three floors up, Jane’s knees trembled.

‘Hey, Jane,’ the slight figure called softly.

‘Hey, Tenille,’ Jane replied, forcing a smile through her fear.